MMORPG.com Age of Conan Reporter John Humphrey writes this look at the Aquilonia region, one of the primary areas in Funcom's Age of Conan.

Aquilonia is the center of the civilized world in Age of Conan, one of nine Hyborian Kingdoms that Robert E. Howard imagined. When Howard created the Hyborian World in 1932 (long before Tolkien’s Middle-Earth in the late 1930’s), he placed Aquilonia in the area of Southern England and France, before a cataclysm that shifted the continents and sent the Pictish Wilderness under the North Sea. Let this not deceive you though. It is a hotspot of political intrigue, deception, plots, and outright insurrection. Aquilonia faces war on two fronts. On the eastern front, Nemedia was defeated less than a year earlier after trying to replace Conan with his predecessor’s last living heir; friction remains despite the Nemedian Ambassador’s attempts to generate a trade treaty. On the western front, the Westermarck yet feels the strain of repeated invasions by collected hordes of Picts.

These near-aborigines massacre all in their path eating human flesh and collecting the skulls of their fallen enemies. Yet, many of the local Aquilonians are none too eager to have the Barbarian King on their throne, King Conan I. To the south, the sorcerors and demon worshippers of Stygia toy with ancient artifacts of lost Acheron in order to conquer the rest of the uncivilized world and make them their slaves. Though the despot Numedides ruled with an iron hand, many nobles, and those Houses vying for favor and power, would unseat King Conan, if given half a chance, and return to less altruistic ways.

Read Aquilonia, Jewel of the West.